sales planning

Businesses today expect finance to play an extended role across departments, including IT, human resources, compliance, operations, sales, marketing, and most importantly, corporate strategy.To successfully deliver on this role, the finance function needs to play a bigger and visible role in real-time decision making and continuous planning. This report explores how, using cloud and analytics, finance leaders can leapfrog a few generations of technology and offer mature analytical feature/functionality and skills to the entire organization.

Increasing revenue while managing costs is a constant challenge for sales executives. Hiring more salespeople is often not an option. This free sales resource kit investigates some of the challenges facing today’s sales teams and ways in which sales can be optimised by using Oracle Sales Cloud to improve sales planning, coaching, prospecting and productivity.
Download this free online resource tool to access videos, demos and whitepapers to see how you can sell smarter today.

Increasing revenue while managing costs is a constant challenge for sales executives. Hiring more salespeople is often not an option. This free sales resource kit investigates some of the challenges facing today’s sales teams and ways in which sales can be optimised by using Oracle Sales Cloud to improve sales planning, coaching, prospecting and productivity.
Download this free online resource tool to access videos, demos and whitepapers to see how you can sell smarter today.

7 critical factors for developing an integrated business process that drives collaboration and unied focus across multiple divisions and departments to align operational planning with financial planning.

Supply Chain Insights in their study found that more than 80% of the companies they surveyed had an S&OP process. However, most companies have varying levels of maturity with it, and hence, very mixed results. The starting point to building a roadmap for a mature and successful S&OP process is to assess your current process. Gartner’s Maturity Model provides a very good mechanism for it.

Many sales organizations continue to operate as they have for years: At headquarters, executives work with sales leaders to set revenue targets for the year. Sales teams receive top-down goals, which cascade across product lines, channels and other business dimensions. The end result is an account-level target, which is assigned to a sales rep. Because most companies do not have an easy way to complete this process—nor do they use a common system of record—they must resort to the quickest and easiest mechanism at hand: spreadsheets, a nonscalable, single-dimensional solution that does not handle complete data sets. This approach also poses challenges across key sales management functions, including planning, execution and optimization.

For most large organizations, sales planning is a siloed process.
Organizations typically need to analyze multiple years’ worth of data to prepare for planning. There is an even split between organizations that lead the planning process from the top down and those that lead it from the bottom up. Most sales organizations complete the planning process before the beginning of the fiscal year.

Technology plays a key role in online shopping, where online retailers gain a greater understanding of their customers through data from their browsing and purchasing habits. Today, when consumers shop in brick-and-mortar stores, they expect the same personalized and responsive service.
To help retailers achieve this level of service, a combination of hardware and software—Intel® Vision Accelerator Design products, cameras, AI deep learning video analysis technology— do the work for you.
Uncover how Advantech system uses the Intel Vision Accelerator Design with Intel Movidius VPU to drive
• Overall store performance such as the number of visitors and transactions, point-of-sale data, sales per shopper and the store’s ranking, and can distinguish traffic patterns by weather and time of day
• Traffic and sales analysis for better staff allocation and marketing-event planning
• Store heatmap analysis for more precise merchandise placement and product promotion

Learn how you can significantly extend the capabilities of your existing Salesforce.com, NetSuite, or other CRM application with an affordable, easy-to-use, and quick-to-deploy solution that automates sales forecasting, improves pipeline visibility, and enables what-if scenario planning.

Optimizing incentive compensation: aligning what you say with how you pay
CSO Insights’ ICPM study* found that 69 percent of organizations use three or more metrics to build their sales compensation plans, but modeling and planning this sales strategy can quickly become too complex as a spreadsheet-driven exercise. It is crucial to get these incentive compensation structures right, because sales reps receive up to 60 percent of their income from incentive comp.
In this white paper, we discuss the disconnect between sales behavior and incentive compensation structure and provide recommended steps towards optimizing your compensation plan.

A Harvard Business Review Analytics Services White Paper
Finance is constantly tested to keep pace in today’s business environment. To keep up, planning needs to become a continuous process that spans departmental boundaries and enables managers to collectively realign resources to respond to market changes.
Organizations must streamline disparate sales and operational planning with traditional financial planning and analysis by using technology to connect people, data, and processes across the organization.
Download this white paper to discover the three steps to moving towards finance-led integrated business planning recommended by the Harvard Business Review.

Read this report to understand how the age of the customer requires tech management to transform into a customer-facing function in speci?c ways. Business technology (BT) brings together technology and traditionally customer-facing roles like marketing, sales, service, brand/product management, and
ful?llment for the purpose of deploying systems of engagement that provide di?erential customer experience. Firms must build these systems of engagement from the outside in, according to how customers move in market spaces. The rules for planning, building, and running systems of engagement are not the same as for previous generations of tech management because customers are not employees. The increasingly crucial role that digital technologies play in customer engagement elevates the CIO role in business — if CIOs can move beyond the traditional IT focus on technology assets and adopt an expanded view that centers on customer experience and choice

To ensure that you provide the right incentives that help your company achieve growth and success, you need to think strategically about the design process of your sales incentive compensation plans. With careful consideration and thoughtful design, you can inspire your teams and empower them to perform above and beyond the competition. Read on to find out how.

Read on to discover how companies are designing and administering their sales compensation plans, and to get additional considerations and summary findings from Xactly analysts based on an analysis of the results.

Learn how you can significantly extend the capabilities of your existing Salesforce.com, NetSuite, or other CRM application with an affordable, easy-to-use, and quick-to-deploy solution that automates sales forecasting, improves pipeline visibility, and enables what-if scenario planning.

In the not-too-distant past, a retailer simply had store-level sales data, from which virtually all planning decisions were made. Today, retailers—from grocery to fashion—are bombarded with data that, with the right tools, can help them gain actionable insight into shoppers’ behavior across channels. In this white paper Oracle Retail explains how retailers can accurately measure consumer interest in specific merchandise and apply that knowledge from one channel to the next, thoroughly understand the implications of promotions on specific customers and customer segments, price on product performance, plan channel-specific assortments accordingly, and coordinate the supply chain processes to ensure execution of the cross channel plan.

Our annual benchmarking report, The State of Connected Planning, investigates how leading organizations accelerate business value through Connected Planning. We surveyed over 1,000 planning professionals across all business functions in 45 countries and 18 industries to uncover leading planning trends.
This Sales-focused brief contains:
• Key findings from Sales professionals
• Planning challenges faced by Sales professionals
• Ideas from Sales leaders about overcoming obstacles and planning more successfully

What should the sales planning process look like?
A poor sales planning process can severely reduce the effectiveness of your sales team and keep high-level business goals from being implemented in the field. In this paper, SiriusDecisions describes how to take a structured approach to the yearly sales planning process and ensure that your sales goals inform your territories, quotas, account segments, and other sales planning deliverables.
In this SiriusDecisions paper, you’ll learn:
• The three crucial stages of the annual sales planning process
• How to ensure that all relevant stakeholders participate in the sales planning process
• How sales ops can help sales leaders set realistic goals for the year

The best sales teams have strong leaders who exercise control and use their experience to set a strategic direction, to inspire and coach sales reps individually. But keeping the team on track and focused on winning it’s not always easy.
Read this article and find out what are the 5 leadership mistakes that keep sales managers from achieving their goals and how you can fix them.

Quota planning is a big concern for sales organizations. Although decades of practice have brought the process closer to a science many companies still struggle to ensure a consistent attainment of corporate goals. This guide will help you decide on the sales quota management approach that best suits your business and get you up to speed with:
• the four key principles of effective quota management;
• the five stages to successful quota planning;
• best practices, takeaways in sales operations, and much more.
Download your free copy!

Sales compensation has the potential to be the most effective and responsive aspect of sales performance management. It can lead to:
• greater process efficiencies
• increased sales and profitability
• greater retention of salespeople.
A well-designed sales compensation process can help the organization reap tremendous financial benefits. It further contributes to creating a company culture characterized by high productivity, team pride, and easy, dependable communication between management and sales teams.
Download this guide to find out the true value of sales compensation management.